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Bronze gui, found in western China
1100–1000 BC
How often do you dine with the dead? It may seem a strange question, but if you’re Chinese it may not be quite so surprising, because many Chinese, even now, believe that deceased family members watch over them from the other side of death and can help or hinder their fortunes. When somebody dies they are equipped for burial with all kinds of practical bits and pieces: a toothbrush, money, food, water – or possibly today a credit card and a computer. The Chinese afterlife often sounds depressingly (perhaps reassuringly) like our own. But there is one great difference: in China the dead are paid huge respect. A well-equipped send-off is just the beginning. Ritual feasting – holding banquets with and for the ancestors – has been for centuries a part of Chinese life. Professor Dame Jessica Rawson, a renowned expert on ancient Chinese bronzes, goes as far as to say:
The primary and most ancient religion in China consists of preparing ceremonial meals for the dead. The first dynasties of China, the Shang [c. 1500–1050 BC] and the Zhou [c. 1050–221 BC], made large numbers of fine bronze containers for food, alcohol and water, and used them in a big ceremony, sometimes once a week, maybe once every ten days. Their belief is that if food, wine or alcohol is properly prepared, it will be received by the dead and nourish them, and those dead, the ancestors, will look after their descendants in return for this nourishment. The bronze vessels which we see were prized possessions for use in life. They were not made primarily for burial, but when a major figure of the elite died, it was believed that he would carry on offering ceremonies of food and wine to his ancestors in the afterlife – and indeed entertain them at banquets.
This spectacular bronze vessel, made about 3,000 years ago, is called a gui. Gui often carry inscriptions which are now a key source for Chinese history, and this bronze is just such a document. It would have been one of a set of vessels of different sizes, rather like a set of saucepans in a smart modern kitchen, and although we don’t know how many companions it might once have had, each vessel would have had a clearly defined role in the preparation and serving of food at the regular banquets that were organized for the dead. This one is about the shape and size of a large punch bowl, about a foot (27 centimetres) across, with two large curved handles. There is an elaborate, flower-like decoration on bands at the top and bottom, but its most striking features are undoubtedly its handles, each of which is a large beast, with tusks, horns and huge square ears caught in the act of swallowing a bird whose beak is just emerging from its jaws. Bronze vessels like this were among the most iconic objects of ancient China, and making them was an extraordinarily complicated business. First the ores that contain copper and tin had to be smelted to make the bronze itself, then the molten bronze had to be cast – a technology in which China led the world. This gui was not made as a single object but as separate pieces cast in different moulds which were then joined together to make one complex and intricate work of art. The result is a vessel which at that date could have been made nowhere else in the world. The sheer skill, the effort and expense involved in making bronze vessels like these made them immediately objects of the highest value and status, fit therefore for the most solemn rituals.
In domestic ceremonies, families offered food and drink to their watchful dead; but on a grander scale governments offered them to the mighty gods. If the gui addressed the ancestors and the world of the past, it also emphatically asserted authority in the present – at a troubled transitional moment for China, when the link between heavenly and earthly authorities was supremely important.
The Shang Dynasty, which came to power in about 1500 BC, had seen the growth of China’s first large cities. Their last capital, at Anyang on the Yellow River in north China, covered an area of 30 square kilometres (10 square miles) and had a population of 120,000 – at the time it must have been one of the largest cities in the world. Life in Shang cities was highly regulated, with twelve-month calendars, decimal measurement, conscription and centralized taxes. As centres of wealth, the cities were also places of outstanding artistic production, in ceramics, jade and, above all, bronze. But then, about 3,000 years ago, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, existing societies collapsed and were replaced by new powers.
The Shang, which had been in power for around 500 years, was toppled by a new dynasty, the Zhou, who came from the west, from the steppes of central Asia. Like the Kushites of Sudan who conquered Egypt at roughly the same time, the Zhou were a people from the edge who challenged and overthrew the old-established, prosperous centre. They ultimately took over the entire Shang kingdom and, again like the Kushites, appropriated not just the state they had conquered but its history, imagery and rituals too. They continued to support artistic production of many different kinds, and they continued the ritual central to Chinese political authority of elaborate feasting with the dead using vessels like our gui. This was in part a public assertion that the gods endorsed the new regime.
The inscription inside the gui commemorates the Zhou’s suppression of a Shang rebellion
If you look inside the gui there is a surprise, which makes it into an instrument of power as well as an object of ritual. At the bottom, where it would have normally been hidden by food when in use, there is an inscription in Chinese characters, not unlike those still used today, which tells us that this particular bowl was made for a Zhou warrior, one of the invaders who overthrew the Shang Dynasty. At this date, any formal writing is prestigious, but writing in bronze carries a very particular authority. The inscription tells us of a significant battle in the Zhou’s ultimate triumph over the Shang:
The King, having subdued the Shang country, charged the Marquis K’ang to convert it into a border territory to be the Wei state. Since Mei Situ Yi had been associated in effecting this change, he made in honour of his late father this sacral vessel.
So the man who commissioned the gui, Mei Situ Yi, did so in order to honour his dead father and at the same time, as a loyal Zhou, commemorated the quashing of a Shang rebellion in about 1050 BC by the Zhou king’s brother, the Marquis K’ang. As writing on bamboo or wood has perished, bronze inscriptions of this kind are now our principal historical source, and through them we can reconstruct the continued tussling between the Shang and the Zhou.
It is not at all clear why the smaller and much less technically sophisticated Zhou were able to defeat the powerful and well-organized Shang state. They seem to have had a striking ability to absorb and to shape allies into a coherent attacking force, but above all they were buoyed up by their faith in themselves as a chosen people. In first capturing and then ruling the Shang kingdom they saw themselves – as so many conquerors do – as enacting the will of the gods; so they fought with the confidence born of knowing that they were the rightful inheritors of the land. But – and this was new – they articulated this belief in the form of a controlling concept that was to become a central idea in Chinese political history.
The Zhou were the first to formalize the idea of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’, the Chinese notion that heaven blesses and sustains the authority of a just ruler. An impious and incompetent ruler would displease the gods, who would withdraw their mandate from him. Accordingly it followed that the defeated Shang must have lost the Mandate of Heaven, which had passed to the virtuous, victorious Zhou. From this time on, the Mandate of Heaven became a permanent feature of Chinese political life, underpinning the authority of rulers or justifying their removal. Dr Wang Tao, an archaeologist at the University of London, describes it this way:
The mandate transformed the Zhou, because it allowed them to rule other people. The killing of a king or senior member of the family was the most terrible crime possible, but any crime against authority could be justified by the excuse of ‘the Mandate of Heaven’. The concept equates in its totemic quality to the Western idea of democracy. In China if you offended the gods, or the people, you would see omens in the skies – thunder, rain, earthquakes. Every time that China had an earthquake, its political rulers were scared, because they interpreted it as a reaction to some kind of offence against the Mandate of Heaven.
Gui like this have been found over a wide swathe of China, because the Zhou conquest continued to expand until it covered nearly twice the area of the old Shang kingdom. It was a cumbersome state, with fluctuating levels of territorial control. Nonetheless, the Zhou Dynasty lasted for as long as the Roman Empire, indeed longer than any other dynasty in Chinese history.
And as well as the Mandate of Heaven, the Zhou bequeathed one other enduring concept to China. Three thousand years ago they gave to their lands the name of ‘Zhongguo’: the ‘Middle Kingdom’. The Chinese have thought of themselves as the Middle Kingdom, placed in the very centre of the world, ever since.